Bakery

by Richard Gorelick and Carrie Wells and The Baltimore Sun | February 25, 2013

The makers of Baltimore's famous Berger Cookies were closer Monday to reopening their Cherry Hill bakery, a spokesman said. The Baltimore City Health Department closed the bakery Jan. 31 for operating without a city-issued food service license. The Health Department has no concerns about food safety after inspecting the facility earlier this month, said spokeswoman Tiffany Thomas Smith. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has an ongoing, “routine” investigation into the bakery after a scheduled inspection in January, said George A. Strait, an agency spokesman, on Monday.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Little in this bombed-out, besieged city functions, little, that is, but the Klas bakery.This is not a time for cakes and pastry. A starving city needs bread, and the Klas bakery, the only industrial one still operating, yesterday turned out 70,000 loaves to feed 300,000 people cut off from the outside world for 10 weeks.Sarajevo is without fresh meat, fruit or vegetables, so people are dependent on the Klas bread factory to survive."We will do whatever it takes to get bread to these people.

Liberty Tsakalos, a former corporate treasurer who managed the retail shop of the H&S Bakery, the Southeast Baltimore family-owned business that was co-founded by her husband, brother and father, died Tuesday of Alzheimer's disease complications at her Harbor East home. She was 94. "She was an anomaly of her time. She was a strong woman working in a man's world, which was especially true of the commercial baking industry in the 1950s and '60s," said her grandson Michael Tsakalos of Hunt Valley.

Frances Woodward Sturgeon, retired treasurer of a bakery firm, died April 22 of cancer at the Calusa Harbor retirement community in Fort Myers, Fla. The former Hillen Road resident was 81.Known as Fran, she began her career in 1937 as a secretary of Rice's Bakery on North Gay Street. She retired as treasurer in 1966.Founded in 1868 near the Fallsway and operated by the City Baking Co., the bakery introduced Vienna bread, Louisiana Ring cake and sliced bread to Baltimoreans. It went bankrupt in 1974 after a gas explosion destroyed most of its turn-of-the-century plant.

Anybody who thinks Americans are eating only rice cakes and celery has never visited a Baltimore area bakery in December.Bakers go bonkers during the holidays. All those cakes, all those cookies, all those items that somebody's Grandma, used to make and that her modern day descendants gotta, just gotta, have for the holidays.At Otterbein's Bakery in Northeast Baltimore the Otterbein brothers predict they will bake 30,000 pounds of sugar cookies this holiday season. To keep up with demand, the brothers have moved to a larger store and rented two nearby apartments that serve as cookie warehouses.

Services for John K. Ruppert, a former bakery executive, will be held at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Evans Funeral Chapel, 8800 Harford Road.Mr. Ruppert, who was 76 and lived on Clydebank Road in Towson, died of heart failure Monday at Mercy Medical Center.He had worked many years for Rice's Bakery, where his father and two brothers also worked, and was its sales manager when the company was sold in 1973 to the Capital Bakery of Harrisburg, Pa.He was district sales manager for Capital until his retirement in 1979.

William Eugene Vespermann, a Baltimore native who operated the Carney Bakery for 28 years, died of pneumonia Friday at his home in Forest, Va.A Mass of Christian burial will be offered for Mr. Vespermann, who was 61, at 10 a.m. tomorrow at St. Ursula's Roman Catholic Church on Harford Road in Parkville.Mr. Vespermann, a graduate of St. Joseph High School, worked as a newspaper carrier for The Baltimore Sun from 1945 to 1948.In 1949, Mr. Vespermann opened the Carney Bakery on Harford Road in Parkville and operated the business until his retirement in 1977.

Services for Marie L. Spilman, who with her husband operated a bakery in the North Avenue Market more than 20 years ago, will be held at 11 a.m. today at the Hiss United Methodist Church, 8700 Harford Road, Parkville.Mrs. Spilman, who was 90, died Tuesday after a long illness at a retirement community in Cornwall, Pa. She moved there three years ago from Elmora Avenue in East Baltimore.The former Marie L. Wheeler was born in Baltimore. Her husband, Wayland Spilman, died in 1970.She is survived by a son, Kenneth E. Spilman of Auburn, Pa.; five grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Two men robbed a Deale bakery and threatened to kill a clerk Tuesday evening, county police reported.The robbers walked through the rear door of Nick's Corner Bakery in the 5800 block of Route 256 around 5:30 p.m. and threatened the 22-year-old clerk."

Baltimore's spending panel agreed Wednesday to give H&S Bakery $200,000 to move its Harbor East distribution center as part of a deal officials say will help keep the business in the city. The Board of Estimates approved the agreement without discussion. Moving the distribution center also stands to financially benefit its owner, John Paterakis, who can use the prime real estate for another purpose. The Harbor East land is eligible for millions of dollars in tax breaks. Comptroller Joan M. Pratt cast the only dissenting vote on the five-member board.

The Rawlings-Blake administration is set to give $200,000 to help H&S Bakery move its Harbor East distribution center to an industrial area of East Baltimore - sparking discussion of whether subsidies should be needed to help a successful business expand. City officials are praising the deal, which goes before the Board of Estimates Wednesday, as an inexpensive way to keep a large employer in Baltimore. But others are questioning why H&S needs any help from a cash-strapped city that has cut back on fire companies and recreation centers in recent years.

On one cupcake, a bunny's back feet, ample behind and fluffy tail are all that can be glimpsed of the creature as it plunges down a rabbit hole. Speckled robins' eggs and jelly beans sit atop knolls of bright green grass on other cupcakes, and a neon-colored marshmallow chick tops a fourth variety. Created on mounds of butter cream frosting with a signature swirl, they are among the Easter offerings at Kupcakes & Co., an Elkridge bakery that produces 10,000 cupcakes a week. Ninety specialty flavors such as Pancakes and Bacon, Strawberries and Champagne, and Salted Caramel rotate on the bakery's daily flavor calendar.

November brings frost, lingering tree color and falling leaves. This year it brings other changes to the neighborhood landscape. On Nov. 8, Anita Ward, 30-year owner of the Roland Park Bakery and Deli, closed her business. After a long run at the Roland Park Shopping Center, she moved to Hampden in 2011, but continued her homey breakfasts, lunches and quality baked goods. Her new location was never as convenient for regulars, but many followed her. On Nov. 7, I saw her number on my phone.

Anita Ward gave her loyal customers big hugs as she served them lunch Friday, Nov. 8. Ward closed her longtime eatery, Roland Park Bakery and Deli, at the end of Friday, after 30 years. "It's just time," she said. "I'm tired of getting up at 3 in the morning. I'm ready for a change. " Ward said she is selling the business to longtime customer Dave Sherman, who plans to turn it into more of a cafe serving soups salads, sandwiches and hamburgers, among other menu items. Ward said the cafe would be open for dinner, whereas Roland Park Bakery and Deli only served breakfast and lunch.

Chris Ford, whose inventive desserts have earned an avid following and widespread praise at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, will be leaving his position as the hotel's pastry chef in October. Ford has accepted a job with the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. Sometime after Oct. 11, his last day at the Four Seasons, Ford will be packing up his pastry bags and driving with his French bulldogs, Mac and Josephine, clear across the country to Beverly Hills, Calif., where he will be taking the position of pastry chef at Keller's Bouchon Bakery.

John Hergenroeder, founder of Woodlea Bakery in Baltimore and patriarch of a German-American family that has been baking cakes and confections in the city for more than a century, died of a heart attack Sunday in an apartment above his bakery. He was 90.Mr. Hergenroeder and his wife, Dorothy Sporrer Hergenroeder, raised 12 children amid the sweet smells of baking bread in their home above their business at 4906 Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore.The bakery is best known for its peach cake, made with fresh peaches cooked with their skins.

Doris Hauswald Moran, former office manager for Hauswald's Bakery, died Saturday of a brain hemorrhage at Maryland Shock Trauma Center. She was 78, and had been a resident of Heartlands Senior Living Village in Ellicott City since 1999. Born Doris Hauswald in Baltimore and raised in Catonsville, where she graduated from high school, she studied music at the Peabody Conservatory. She began working as a teen-ager, icing and boxing cakes in the Baltimore bakery her maternal grandmother had founded in 1915.

Sam Schmidt, who is in town for the Grand Prix of Baltimore, didn't get to celebrate his 49th birthday on the race track. That didn't stop Baltimore's Charm City Cakes from wishing the owner of Schmidt Hamilton Motorsports a happy birthday. Two weeks after his actual birthday, Schmidt was presented Saturday afternoon with a race car cake. Members of Schmidt's team, including IndyCar drivers Simon Pagenaud and rookie Tristan Vautier, and onlookers sang “Happy Birthday” to Schmidt, a former driver who became a quadriplegic after a car he was driving at the Walt Disney World Speedway crashed into a wall on Jan. 6, 2000.

Sidney Silber, a retired real estate developer, philanthropist and accomplished gardener who once ran his family's bakery, died of cancer Tuesday at his Lutherville home. He was 95. Born in Baltimore, he was the son of Isaac and Dora Rodbell Silber. His father had been trained in his native Austria as a baker. The family lived above their bakery at Monroe Street and Westwood Avenue. "Like many of his siblings, my father worked in the store, handled deliveries and ran errands, all as dictated by his father," said his son, Douglas Silber.